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US Nuclear Power Enters the Digital Age
An anonymous reader writes "South Carolina's Oconee Nuclear Station will replace its analog monitoring and operating controls with digital systems, as part of a $2 billion plant upgrade by its owner, Duke Energy. It will become the first nuke plant in the US to use digital controls, and its upgrade may be quickly followed by others. The main driver for the move is cost savings; worries about reliability and hackers have been the reason digital systems haven't been adopted sooner."
Absolutely nothing. We went with the proven nuclear-industry reliability of Siemens(tm)(r) brand PLC hardware. Absolutely nothing could go wrong.
...hackers have been the reason digital systems haven't been adopted sooner.
Here's an idea, let's not connect it to the Internet.
Isolate the system, for Christ's sake. There's no reason that a system like this should have any connection to the Internet, any external access at all (except maybe read access for monitoring at home by the chief engineers or something), or -- and this is the part that people don't seem to get -- no freaking 802.11 access.
I find it amazing that, working in the medical field, every hospital I walk into is at least partially dependent on wireless networks. (Hint: Send desync commands continually with an iPod -- network down.) But not only that, but they go through all these hijinks to make life suck for legitimate users, and miss obvious things like direct network access through Ethernet ports. I walked into a room a few weeks ago, and a kid had plugged his laptop into the hospital Ethernet and it was (I later verified) BEHIND the firewall. Another hospital used WEP encryption for its "official" network, and my laptop broke it in about ten minutes in a call room.
You have all sorts of people working in administrative roles in these institutions that think security is defined as:
1. Disable the Windows "run" command to piss me off.
2. Don't allow me to click on the clock to see a calendar.
3. Block web sites randomly for "security" reasons. (Hint: I'm a doctor. If I'm going to a web site I either have some legitimate reason to, or I'm goofing off because I have some critical patient that I'm stuck in the hospital with.)
4. Throw up wireless networks with some idiotic click through screen before it will route anything, thus breaking every automated device on the market.
Probably any of us on Slashdot could do a better job than some of these idiots.
Windows XP was a stable, hugely popular operating system that has had over a decade of bug and security patches. Give me XP over the latest xnix flavor any day.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I was and electrician in the Naval Nuclear Power Program from 94-00 and they used hardly any digital anything. Motor controllers were made up of relays. Voltage regulators worked on saturated cores and such. Even the control rods were moved using AC or DC motors, depending on the plant. It seems hard to believe, but nuclear power is a technology from the 50s. The USS Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine, was launched in 1954, which I find amazing that 57 years ago they had nuclear power plants that could operate a ship while underwater, and that ship wasn't decommissioned until 1980. Yes, for alarms there are mostly just various things that trip relays such as thermocouples, pressure switches, salinity cells, etc. If you understand how the plant works, it's easy to see how it doesn't require anything digital to run. However, you could definitely save some serious cash in manpower by automating things.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
And do you know what we would call the catastrophic failure event in which Duke Energy might irradiate a large swath of land? Hint: it includes the word Nukem!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.